Babies are pre-wired to perceive the world
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Not only that we know that fetuses can perceive the world. We know fetuses recognize its mother's voice in the womb.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97635
And premature babies benefit from hearing their mother's voice.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/shouldstorm/201909...
The only mystery is the neurological mechanism of how the brain is and gets wired.
It teaches itself and if you keep a baby in the darkness for enough time after birth and only later introduce it to the light and images it will not be able to see.
We might be prewired but a lot of building, configuring and pruning is going on with our neural networks in response to stimuli. Without stimuli we fail to develop many functions.
https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Held-1963.pdf
Not humans but kittens. Punch line: the group that was able to receive sensorimotor feedback entrained a much better sense of spatial perception than the group that didn't. Probably why babies are always making noises and touching shit during critical period plasticity is for sensory training/refinement (among other things)
Edit: I don't think there is a binary in terms of brain development pre/post birth. Of course if the baby sufficiently developms in womb it will start to get sensorimotor feedback from within the womb...
Of course, just as you say, like almost any other physiological process, if you do not expose those pre-built structures to enough stimuli, they will atrophy. This is especially true in the early developmental period.
Is that true?
It's not as if the baby somehow magically changes into something else when he or she passes the birth canal.
A baby also doesn't magically transform into a toddler, and a child, and teenager, and a man, and a senior citizen and a corpse, either. And yet somehow we manage to maintain different terms for these stages of life without confusing anyone unduly.
Yet, we also don't dehumanize people who are on life support in hospitals.
In context of the debate around start of life and abortion in the US, at least, both baby and fetus are heavily loaded terms whose meanings are divorced from actual science.
Edit: for example, CNN recently retracted certain wording on an anti-infanticide bill for babies born during botched abortions. I believe the wording was something along the lines of "fetus that was born".
Why would humans be any different? We are most likely pre-wired with pathways that facilitate learning in specific ways that enable our brains to develop specific skills, such as speech. Although, it would be pretty great if we could pre-wire ourselves to know how to use a toilet.
You are basically saying we are born with a brain and corresponding nervous system. That's a deep insight, but nothing fundamentally novel.
> When we look around the animal kingdom, we are bombarded with examples of how other animals are born knowing how to walk, or even weave spider webs.
It frequently amazes me that lower animals manage to get laid.
As for spiders though, these little criters should not be underestimated. On the one hand, one should not read too much inteligence into the application of severely limited options. On the other hand, learning from limited rules has well been proven feasable, I think. Either way, that's not exactly "born with" an ability, rather reflexes and capacity. What amounts to instinct.
my objection to "Boot ROM" in another comment was downvoted, so, that? Suppose intrinsic memory or epigenetics.
[1]: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/exploring-weight-agnostic-...
Not really a conflicting statement, but neither to contradict my skepticism.
They start climbing immediately after being born, before the mother can teach them anything. What else than genes could be behind that?
So really what you might have is a certain neuronal cell type that sends signaling molecules that cause it to divide in a very particular way that could roughly create a structure similar to a face detecting filter. If cells can grow into bones or coral reefs, why not face detecting neurons?
Beyond that, it's pretty clear that there are very hardwired parts of the brain around bootstrapping. You're born with the ability to recognize faces, and mirror neurons reflect the actions of those around you in a very similar way to you taking those actions yourself.
I found this remark by Margaret Livingstone, quoted in the article, very surprising. What if anything does innate functional specialization have to do with whether "humans are special"? How does the presence of such specialization distinguish us from "lower animals"?
Perhaps the reasoning goes that what might make humans special is the presence of human-specific innate specialized brain mechanisms. But while not everyone might agree, I tend to think the difference may be more related to subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules". We know brains are highly context sensitive and plastic, and judging by Livingstone's earlier quote, she agrees. So why is the charged question of human exceptionalism (which she already seems to accept given the reference "lower animals") suddenly linked so strongly to the presence of innate specialization?
What makes humans special among mammals, other than our big brains, is that we're very good at learning from each other. A 2 year old human isn't really much better at solving mechanical puzzles than a 2 year old monkey but that human is a positive genius at social learning compared to the monkey. And once that human learns a word like "or" they can start applying the disjunctive syllogism in ways a monkey will never match. A large plastic brain probably limits how smart a human can get but it's seemingly hardwired traits like an infants preferences for learning from people with accents similar to their mothers that kickstart humans. See Joseph Henrich's work.
And it's not exactly an advantagevthat once crystalized, my speach is pretty much incapable of adapting to Russian or anything more foreign.
Killer whales, long-finned pilot whales and short-finned pilot whales each have more neurons than humans [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Surprisingly, certain birds have a very high brain to body size ratio.
"Specialized brain modules" seems like an unfair way to state the argument. The article mentions "maps" or "scaffolding" that "drive the final organization of the brain," which is a bit more subtle.
But doesn't she allow for the possibility that something like "number of neurons" could drive human difference? What else could be meant by:
> Or can we explain it using low-level principles we’ve inherited from lower animals
I agree with you that the source of the human-animal distinction isn't relevant to the question of whether the distinction is worth making. I think the distinction is worth making regardless of the source of the distinction (though the "higher" and "lower" language seems silly).
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-wolves-rea...
He asks about a dichotomy, but not a false one.
It even mentions another study she did on face selection in monkeys.
Try grinning at a newborn baby. She'll grin back. It seems to be a reflex, and it seems to fade away after a few days' life.
They do display emotions in their face at ferocious pace, no filter like adults - and so far they correspond to overall situation pretty well.
As for smile-worthy - one of his personal gods just came to him to see up close (aka papa checking how is he). If that isn't a happy moment, I don't know what is.
If you asked me today how I FEEL, I'd say it was that way from day one. But I know for a fact that wasn't the case originally.
I would give up my life to protect him. My dreams and goals became meaningless (and still are, although its only 2+ months now). They will come back of course eventually, in some amended form.
Or maybe our baby wasn't "basically a bag of screams and shit" helped. Not that those aren't present, but this isn't the dominant feature that I think of when thinking about him.
Yes, they're fickle and a lot of hard work. Even if you do things right, there's going to be a decent amount of screams you just have to endure. And the lack of communicative feedback, except for screams. They're little mysteries.
Think of it like this: You can make a rather arbitrary nonsense claim and still hope for a response that corrects it, or has something interesting to say at least.
Alas, I am not the response one would hope for the most-- not offering a map to the kingdom either, while a connectome alone isn't worth much anyway.